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“Trump is a lying jackass, but he’s all Republicans like me have!”

I am in the tenth grade, and I read your article about the Trump signs.

I really hope you don’t see all Republicans as people like Donald Trump. We don’t all hate gays, women, people of color, Muslims, etc. He doesn’t represent us. But, while we can both agree that Trump is a lying jackass, he is all Republicans like me have.

Tell your roommate thank you for his service and have a nice day.

– A frustrated young Republican

That’s awesome that you’d take the time to think about what I wrote and pen such an eloquent response. You give me hope, man. You are WAY more grown up than most of the adults on the Internet!

As I see it, we’re talking about two different things here: conservative values, in general, and Donald Trump, the candidate.

Personally, I believe really strongly in a lot of traditionally conservative values.

Whatever lot in life the world has handed you, fundamentally, it’s on you to make something worthwhile out of it. Our society depends on smart people stepping up of their own accord, and I think it’s great to make money, as long as you’re doing so responsibly.

But Trump doesn’t just hold some different attitudes about the world than me. A lot of the stuff that he’s proposing is truly terrifying.

It’s easy to talk about “illegal aliens” in the abstract, but the vast, vast majority of folks who come here from other countries without the right federal documents are just hardworking families doing everything they can to make a better future for their kids.

Can you imagine if you were born into such a family?

Trump has called for rounding up at least 5 million such people (about five times more people than live in all of Maine) and effectively kidnapping them at gunpoint, detaining them for unspecified amounts of time in barbaric immigration detention centers and then forcing them over the border. God knows where they’ll end up.

And Trump doesn’t just want to deport undocumented workers, he wants to deport entire families. Grandparents. Little kids. It’s likely that many may die along the way.

President Andrew Jackson did something similar in the 1830s when he ordered the federal government to forcefully remove the Cherokee nation from the east side of the Mississippi River, uprooting them to Oklahoma.

The number of people that Jackson forced out was exponentially smaller than what Trump’s proposing, but the impact of it was still incredibly devastating.

That’s why it’s gone down in history as the “Trail of Tears.”

Is this really what you want to vote for?

Whether your a chef in a kitchen, a contractor running a construction crew or the CEO of a big company, being a true leader means keeping all the people you’re responsible for as productive and united as possible.

Real leaders don’t egg on violent troublemakers, they stand up to them, serving the community at large and fostering the best in people, not their worst.

Trump does the opposite.

I’m not saying that Hillary’s perfect.

For one thing, she’s far more militaristic than I am (yet substantially less so than Trump), and she’s much closer to Wall Street than I think the President ought to be (but again, I’d still trust her fiscal policies over his any day).

I think it’s fine to hate them both. Most of my friends are right there with you.

But don’t fool yourself into saying that, as a conservative, Trump’s all you’ve got.